The Islamic State Might Be Going Green

The Islamic State (IS) could be having a green moment — and, no, that's not a reference to all the cash flowing into the newly formed caliphate from oil sales and ransom.

According to a recent tweet from Charles Lister, visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, IS may be dabbling in environmentalism. Lister circulated an image of two alleged IS posters. The first prohibits logging in Iraq's Nineveh province, the other dynamite fishing in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor.

ISIS is turning to environmentalism: No logging in Ninawa, — Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister)December 3, 2014

The apparent interest in Earth-friendly policies raises the question of what IS believes it might achieve by protecting the environment, as the posters seem to indicate.

"IS clearly want to be seen like a state," Yezid Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Center told VICE News, "and if the photos are genuine, this seems to confirm the same pattern — that is, of IS assuming the normal bureaucratic functions of government departments."

The show of environmental authority, Sayigh said, could also be based on a continuation of previous government policies. In jihadi-controlled areas, IS has obligated local functionaries and former government administrators to resume the activities they undertook while under Iraqi or Syrian government rule. In this way, the anti-logging and -dynamite fishing signage could be a reflection, he said, of "these people doing what they were already doing before IS took over, albeit now in IS's name."

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Another possibility, say observers, is that IS is loath to permit any lucrative exploitation of resources when the profits might bypass its own treasury. IS has financed its war effort and crude bureaucratic infrastructure, in part, through revenues generated from oil sales and even imposing road tolls and business taxes. Given this attentiveness toward capturing financing wherever possible, so the theory goes, IS would certainly want a cut from any logging or fishing operation.

But recent news reports suggest IS is neither projecting a coherent environmental agenda nor functioning very well as a state. In IS-controlled Mosul the impacts of an increasingly contaminated water supply have led to a proliferation of water-borne illnesses like hepatitis, which has been exacerbated by a dearth of available medication. The crumbling water treatment infrastructure has led some Mosul residents to dig their own wells, rather than consume the potentially sickening water.

Yaseen Taha, an Iraqi urban planner with family in Mosul, downplays any suggestion of a coherent conservationist agenda within the caliphate. He offers a wry anecdote: "When IS fighters were filmed shooting guys in the head and pushing them into a river, they were acting to meet their environmental objectives, right?"

Taha added — keeping his sardonic tone — that power cuts in Mosul could technically be cast as conservationist, since there's less electricity being used, and IS has promoted the idea that Muslims were "better-off spiritually" before electricity became widely available.

While the situation in Mosul is due mostly to a legacy of crumbling public infrastructure that it has inherited, IS has made a significant contribution of its own toward contaminating the environment — and not just from dumping bodies into rivers. According to one news report, IS had intentionally used crude oil to poison drinking water in Iraq's Salahuddin province in response to repeated military defeats in the area.

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The group has seized various oilfields and dams in Iraq and Syria, enabling it to both project its authority and exert coercive power over recalcitrant populations through such means as threatening water cuts. IS has also appropriated agricultural production. In August, its forces took control of some of Iraq's most fertile territory and an estimated 40 percent of its wheat harvest, according to the United Nations. Moves like this help to disseminate the idea that food and water security are dependent upon support for IS — a message made all the more clear by its contamination of the wells of its opponents.

But the state of water and air quality may have less to do with any particular IS practice and more to do with the fallout of decades of war and sanctions in the region — a scenario that some observers say implicates the United States and its coalition partners.

Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, told VICE News: "The main problem with US militarism and the environment these days is that its interventions — as in Iraq, Libya and Syria —seem to create failed states."

Refugees, civil wars, economic collapse, and heightened regional tensions, in other words, aren't the only outcome from these wars. Environmental degradation is emerging as another — albeit overlooked — outcome of successive military campaigns in the region.

"In failed states there's no capacity for environmental management, remediation, or regulation," he added. "In collapsed or failed states the water and air are polluted and there's no regulatory body to stop the process."

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Follow Belen Fernandez on Twitter: @MariaBelen_Fdez